Aurora Ribero plays the steel-nerved hero 13 in The Shadow Strays on Netflix.Ewet/Netflix/Netflix
The Shadow Strays
Written and directed by Timo Tjahjanto
Starring Aurora Ribero and Hana Malasan
Classification N/A; 144 minutes
Streaming on Netflix starting Oct. 18
Critic’s Pick
Timo Tjahjanto doesn’t kill easily. The Indonesian filmmaker behind two of the past decade’s most gloriously brutal action films – 2016’s Headshot and 2018’s The Night Comes for Us – prefers his violence over the top, his weapons deviously devised, and his on-screen body counts so ridiculously high that even John Wick would blanche. All of which makes the director’s latest exercise in mortal combat so over-the-top glorious, even if its supersized sensibilities might exhaust all but the most diehard of audiences.
Opening with an affectionately bloody homage to Toshiya Fujita’s 1973 genre touchstone Lady Snowblood and closing with a coda that ropes in one of Indonesia’s biggest action stars to create a Marvel-like cinematic universe, The Shadow Strays is an all-you-can-beat buffet of action-movie excess. The plot is been-there-killed-that – a young mercenary code-named 13 (Aurora Ribero) working for a secretive society of assassins decides to help a teenage neighbour in Jakarta, leading to all sorts of chaos – but any basic narrative threads are just excuses for Tjahjanto to stage a series of bone-crunching set pieces.
Finding new and inventively cruel ways to shuffle henchmen off this mortal coil, the director levels up his trademark use of the silat style of martial arts, overkilling the concept of overkill. In Tjahjanto’s opinion, it is not enough to stab someone but to keep stabbing them – with an increasing speed and intensity – until the knife practically rips through the screen.
Ribero is impressive as the steel-nerved hero, but she is also matched beating-for-beating by Hana Malasan, who plays a mentor sent in by their shared employer to clean up 13’s mess. As the two women clash in the film’s final moments, Tjahjanto executes a truly glorious extravaganza of choreographed carnage, as impressive as it is overwhelming.
The true shame of The Shadow Strays, though, is that it demands to be seen with a sold-out crowd of fellow blood-and-guts enthusiasts – an impossibility at the moment, given that it’s releasing straight to Netflix. But moviegoers who missed its handful of theatrical screenings at last month’s Toronto International Film Festival shouldn’t feel too bad – they’ll get their big-screen fix of Tjahjanto soon enough, as the director is currently filming the sequel to the Bob Odenkirk action flick Nobody. Prepare yourselves.